Welcome. The Silver Spring Catholic Worker
gives hospitality on a small scale to seniors and those who come to Washington, D.C. for demonstrations, lobbying, internships and studying. Our legal clinic provides free legal assistance at Superior Court in Washington, D.C. in landlord-tenant disputes, small claims, immigration, mental health and mental retardation rights, social security and disability rights and child custody.

Members of the community include Patricia, Veronica Robinson, Barry Hale, Robert and Karen Jones, Patrick K. and Toby and Hazel Terrar (1914-2005). We often have a meal and watch a video together on Saturday or Sunday evenings. The public is invited. We are located in a two-bedroom house and garage-bedroom. It is
fifteen miles north up Georgia Avenue from downtown Washington, D.C. It is eight miles north up Georgia Avenue from downtown Silver Spring. The mailing address is Silver Spring, because that is what it was fifty years ago when the community was established. But we are closer to Aspin Hill and three miles north of the Glenmont Metro station.

Veronica

At the house is a desktop publishing
cooperative. Its name is CWP (CWPublishers).
We are self-supporting and do not need financial
or other contributions. When we started about ten years ago, we had ambitions
of re-establishing the pre-trial house that used to exist at Fourteenth and N
St. NW, Washington, D.C. from the late 1960s to the mid-1980s. But because we
have had to take care of our own family members, this larger project is on
hold.

Dalzell, S.C. Farm Connection

The Silver Spring Catholic Worker has an agrarian connection. It is at Dalzell, South Carolina, which is about seven hours (400 miles) South, near Sumter, South Carolina. Right now the farm consists of an old house that is not in good shape and a garden that is also not in good shape. It is operated in coalition with Food Not Bombs in Charleston, S.C. Paying jobs in Dalzell are slim, so those connected with it live elsewhere to make a living. They come when they can for a week or a season to work in the fields, fish, study, pray and hang out.

The Dalzell, S.C. "Catholic Worker" and "Food Not Bombs" Hospitality House

The farm is 109 acres. It is owned by Robbie Jones. He grew up on the place, as did his father, grandparents and assorted ancestors.
Click Here
if you would like some history about the place. Robbie is near 60, but has never farmed it. He rents it to Ronnie Weldon, who lives on a contiguous property and farms about 1000 acres in a commercial operation (corn, soybean, peanuts, sunflower, wheat, pecans). Before Ronnie, it was Ronnie’s father who farmed it. The Catholic Worker--Food not Bombs Soup Kitchen folks for the past four years have been farming—or talking about farming about 20 acres around the old Jones-Catholic Worker Farmhouse that Ronnie and Robbie said we could mess with. (For Free).

In the 2009 growing season several folks lived in the old farmhouse fulltime. Others came for various periods. Some brought their children. It is a cheap, fun, exciting, educational vacation. Everything is free, except if you want to eat, you need to bring food, especially if you are going to stay a while. If it is the cold months, you need to bring plenty of bedding and clothing. There is no electricity or running water. The door is always open (and the windows). You are always welcome, but in the winter months, you may be the only one there.

Currently (Spring 2010) sixteen students in a class dealing with the history of Arab food which is taught by Stephen Sheehi are growing an organic garden of garlic, ginger and horseradish. These do not need constant tending and take a while to mature. The students are in the USC’s Honors College, Arabic Program and Sustainable Learning Center (Green Quad). Their gardening is called a Service Learning Component. They do their work on Saturdays. They are also building a traditional Arab “tanour” oven. The program has the approval of USC President Pastides.

If you are interested in visiting or staying on the farm, we will be glad to give you more information. Or just come on by. There is no phone on the farm. You can contact us in Maryland. Or in South Carolina you can contact Stephen who is with “Food Not Bombs”

Click on the small photo to the left to view a larger photo of a map showing the location of the Dalzell CW farmhouse.

Click on the small photo to the left to view a larger photo of Pat on the roof of the Dalzell CW farmhouse on 6/1/06. The sweet gum tree that Hurricane Hugo blew over onto the house in 1989 had been left unattended for the past seventeen years. But one afternoon we finally got to it. b69

Click on the photo to the left to get another view of the cleanup. Owner Robert Jones is on the roof of his father's, grandparents' and great-grandparents' house. The roof is supported by one foot in diameter beams and the tree did no damage. A few more work sessions and the place will be as hospitable as it was one hundred years ago. b72

Click on the photo to the left to enlarge. This is a version of a Dalzell Hospitality House in the 1930s. The picture is from Howard Woody and Allan Thigpen, South Carolina Postcards, Volume X: Sumter County (Charleston, S.C.: Arcadia, 2005), p. 99. The picture caption reads:

Hobo House, c. 1930s. Mr. J.R. Moore of Dalzell built a small house beside the highway with a sign reading, “Hitch Hiker’s Home,” where a traveler could spend a night free and obtain breakfast.

Mr. Moore’s hospitality was a cut above what we have been able to provide so far.

In addition to the farm, we have a monastic link, which is located about a two-days drive from here in Iowa. It is run by Stephen and Krystyna Panusz Startari:

Activities and Upcoming Events in our Neighborhood

Each Friday, 7:00-9:00 P.M. On-going vigil at Walter Reed Army Medical Center (North Gate) 7200 Georgia Ave., at Elder St., NW. The vigil is organized by CODE PINK, the women’s peace vigil. The first vigil was on March 25, 2005. It is designed to draw attention to the late-night arrival of seriously-wounded soldiers from Iraq and Afghanistan. These soldiers are the most seriously-wounded – with shattered limbs, brain injuries and post-traumatic stress disorders. They are flown into Andrews Air Force base and delivered to Walter Reed (and Bethesda Naval Medical Center) under cover of darkness, at 10 p.m. or later. The night-time arrivals appear to be scheduled purposely to minimize public attention to, and knowledge of, the flow of seriously-wounded soldiers from the war. This is consistent with the Bush Administration policy prohibiting the photographing of coffins arriving at Dover AFB.
Click here
to view the CODE PINK web page which has a flyer describing the vigil as well as their other activities.

CODEPINK DC, DAWN, MilitaryFreeZone and Veterans for Peace DC sponsore from time to time a counter recruitment demonstration at the United States Armed Forces Recruiting Center, 8202 Georgia Avenue, Silver Spring, Maryland. The purpose is to tell the military that we will not tolerate dishonest and illegal recruitment methods and to tell the administration that the high school records of our children are not "free" under the Leave No Child Behind Act. We demand "opt-in" instead of "opt out" of access to information of our students. The flyer for this event reads:

The Army Stands Down, But We Stand UP!

Stand UP Against Predatory Recruiters

Stand UP for Money for College, not Combat

Stand UP for Paredes and Benderman

Stand UP for our Troops in Iraq - Bring them home!

Stand UP against war profiteers

March 13 to 16, 2008. Iraq Veterans Against the War’s "Winter Soldier" at the National Labor College 10000 New Hampshire Avenue in Silver Spring. The veterans provide accounts of their experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan. See IVAW.

Catholic Worker Resources in the Washington, D.C. Area

There are a number of Catholic Worker houses and Catholic Worker type
communities in the Washington, D.C. area which provide substantial social
services and solicit for volunteers and financial aid. These are:

Silver Spring CW Bibliography

"District of Columbia History and Dorothy Day".
Click here.
for an article about Dorothy Day, her jail time at the District of Columbia's Occoquan Workhouse and the failed effort in the 1990s to return the workhouse to its earlier beneficial purpose. This article originally appeared in Hospitality (Atlanta, Georgia: The Open Door Community, November 1998), vol. 17, no. 11, p. 9.

"An Early 1900s Catholic Worker: Rev. Thomas McGrady’s Catholic Socialism."Click here.
for an article in HTML about Catholic worker Rev. Thomas McGrady (1863-1907) and the liberation theology of his day. This article originally appeared in Dialectical Anthropology (New York: 1983), vol. 7, pp. 209-235. Click here for the same article in PDF format.

"On Solving Silver Spring's Illegal Drug Problem."Click here.
for an article by Dean Richards "On Solving the Illegal Drug Problem." This article originally appeared in a modified version by Rion Scott in Washington City Paper (November 2-8, 2001), vol. 21, no. 44, (Drug-PM.doc).

"A History of and Solution to Silver Spring's Adoption and Foster Care Problem Viewed from the Bottom Up."Click here.
for an article by Dean Richards "A HISTORY OF AND SOLUTION TO D.C.'S ADOPTION AND FOSTER CARE PROBLEM"
(7/23/98, p181-ad.doc).

Women in National Parliaments
(Informed citizens recommend parliamentary gender equality, about which this site reports, as the single best indicator of how decent any land is for working people and indeed, all inhabitants, including children, and a critical factor for sustaining the planet.)

Women’s History
(This site, recommended by women of the community, is about women’s history. Typical of its features is Julia Ward Howe’s work to establish a “Mother's Day for Peace” in which women came together across national borders to recognize what they held in common above what divided them. Howe’s work started in 1870 in response to the bloodshed of the Franco-Prussian War. Today, another Julia, Senator Julia Morgan of
Wales and her husband Prime Minister Rhodri Morgan,
have brought women and men as partners in the legislature of Wales, which, like Rwanda, has gender
50-50 in office, and is within the range of mid-thirties to 50 percent for each gender believed to best represent and protect humanity and life in any region, and throughout the planet. All Scandinavian countries, most of Europe and many other countries, such as Costa Rica, Argentina, Germany, Austria, Netherlands, the cities of France, the villages of India and others, and others have already reached this level.)